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The luncheon celebrates and recognized the achievements and servant leadership fo businesswomen in Seward County. Joan Tanderup of Seward Motor Freight will be honored as the 2018 Outstanding Woman in Business.

Nebraska Beef Council Provides Support for China Reopening

KEARNEY, NE – The Nebraska Beef Council (NBC) Board of Directors met last week and discussed the recent progress regarding the reopening of China to U.S. beef. An overarching principle for the NBC Board is to ‘put the money where the people are’ and maximize beef checkoff dollars. Because of the importance of this market to the U.S. beef community the NBC committed $300,000 to support the U.S. Meat Export Federation’s (USMEF) efforts in enhancing demand for beef.

“The discussion about supporting USMEF in this marketplace was positive and an obvious place for us to invest beef checkoff dollars,” said Buck Wehrbein, NBC Chairman and cattle feeder from Mead. “With the equivalent of over 2600 head of cattle per day being exported from Nebraska alone, we know the significance of this market and want to show our support.”

The commitment of these dollars fell right in line with the discussions held at the USMEF Spring Conference held last week in Arlington, VA. Joel Haggard, USMEF Senior Vice President for the Asia Pacific, said, “This funding comes at an opportune time and is a great up-front investment from Nebraska that will help us get deep into our plan for reentering the Chinese marketplace.”

Although the final details are still being put into place, the NBC Board chose to provide this support now to enable USMEF to make plans and move forward when the Chinese market opens.

“The USMEF team has a variety of strategic activities proposed and these dollars allow them to take action as we move closer to this opening that the beef community has waited for so long to happen,” said Wehrbein.